>In the opening chapter of "Astrology Looks at History", Tyl tells
>us, "the danger within the rectification process is that
>astrologers engineer the astrology to show what they expect to
>see, what they want to see." How much more so than rectification
>are the dangers of projecting our conceptualizations on to those
>of the ancients. We have no real manner for understanding the
>circumstances surrounding the birth of Alexander nor if the
>astrology supposedly used was something we would dare call
>astrology.

The field of rectification of the Ascendant will continue being a
sorrowful story until we find a way to reach peer consensus- A
year and a half ago, in the Festival list, we were discussing the
rectification of the chart of Bob Dole: there were 5 of us each
claiming to have rectified Bob Dole's chart, and we had 5 different
charts altogether, with different Ascendant signs and after dozens
of interchanged postings and arguments, zero consesnus could be
reached.. The astrologers using the Harmonics method could not
understand my arguments based on my protractor method , and I
could not understand how they could place more weight on their
Harmonic charts arguments than in my reasonings based on aspectual
and non-aspectual canonic planetary relations affecting the
hypothetical relevant cusps on key transits of Bob Dole s life.
Other people were using transits in a helter skelter fashion to
arrive to altogether different Ascendants for Bob Dole. I have seen
in the internet 3 different rectified charts for President
Clinton, and 4 different rectified charts of the Pope John Paul II.
I mean, really, things couldn't possibly be worse ! . The lack
of consensus is just total, and that is among professionals who do
this for a living, like myself !.

So, Yes !, I am very aware of all the pitfalls of rectification of the
Ascendant, because for more than 20 years now I have been
rectifying a chart every day. As a rule, I never give a reading
without full rectification....particularly because almost always my
readings include the cause and date of death of my clients. When
you are predicting death from the chart, an imprecision of 5
minutes in the specification of the Official Birth Time (OBT) may
signify a completely different story as to when and what of the
person is going to die. The point I was making is that the fact
that there is a precise instant when the snap-shot is taken is a
reality you cannot ignore when you rectify the cuasps of a chart.
Moving the birthtime even one minute has determining implications
as to how long the person is going to live or about the cause of
death. To me that's an application of what I have been calling
Axiom Number Two, or the Axiom of Beginnings. Upon afixing a
beginning, you afix a length of life. When you rectify the chart
of someone who is already dead, and review his wedding day planets,
you will find that the same instant of birth accounting for his
wedding day, is the same instant of birth accounting for his cause
and time of death. His fate by default is anchored to a punctual
beginning, and there is no way to account for this unless you are
standing in the firm Axiom of Beginning. To deny this, like you
have done without further explaining, is really taking the bones
out of the skeleton

I keep full documentation of close to 7,000 charts that I have rectified
for clients....this includes information as to the number of
siblings and their sexes, as well as number of children and their
sexes, and listings of the most important dated biographical
events, for each individual client I've seen. To rectify a
chart, when there is an OBT ro start with, I cast the chart of the
client in High Resolution format, and on it I place, coded with
different colors using very fine tip markers, the planets for a
half a dozen or so important dates of the client's personal
history. Then, using a two-tips stainless steel protractor, I
detect canonic relations. A canonic relation is a combination of
at least 4 factors of which at least one is the relevant OBT Cusp ,
at least one relevant planet from the biographical date under
scrutiny, and relevant natal planets.......the relevancy depends of
course on the nature of the event being used for rectification: if
it is the wedding day date, for example, the relevant Cusps will be
1 and 7, and the relevant planets will be the almutens, rulers
and/or natural significators of the event in question. Thus, for
the wedding day date, the relevant planets will be the almutens and
the rulers of the relevant Cusps, plus Venus/Mars and Sun/Moon as
zodiacal significators of the event independently of the mundane
almutenships and rulerships. Each canonic relation becomes an
equation which is rearranged algebraically so that the relevant
Cusp is left alone on one side of the equal sign, with all
remaining factors on the other. The equation is then solved for
the hypothetical Cusp, whose hypothetical longitude is thus
ascertained. A little arithmetics then allows us to obtain the
Rectified Birth Time as per Hypothesis number N of family F. More
canonic relations lead to more equations, each yielding another
Hypothetical Rectified Birth Time that will be classified as of
whatever family it converges with, timewise of course. Quite often,
a very keen statistical sense is required then to decide how to
ponder and average the numbered hypothetical birth times of the
different families, to arrive to the Final Rectified Birth Time,
that should be the True Birth Time.

I evolved my method through practice, through the years of rectifying
charts for clients. It is not yet in its final form. Eventually,
it will be ready to be algorithmisized, so that sometime it may
become software that every astrologer may apply to rectify his/her
clients charts prior to delivering a reading. The only currently
extant type of rectification software, like Astrolabe's Jig-Saw for
example, falls quite short of fulfilling its aim, due to the fact
that they pretend to rectify considering only intensity of
aspectation to the angular cusps on the key important biographical
dates provided by the client. My method, is based equally on
aspects and in non-aspectual relations, that the protractor
facilitates finding, which are a lot more important and basic than
aspects, at least when it gets to rectifying a chart, particluarly
when the biographical datings data is scanty. After due practice,
the astrologer learns that certain types of non-aspectual
relations are extremely ubiquitous, on certain dates. For example,
on wedding day, it is extremely frequent to find that the angle
between wedding Venus and wedding Mars be the same, or an
aliquote, than the angle from the natal Moon/Sun mid-point to the
natal Horizon, either Cusp 1 or 7. So once you have the wedding
day planets color coded on the OBT chart, you stick leg 1 of the
protractor on wedding Venus and leg 2 on wedding Mars, so you have
your protractor open now with the wedding Venus/Mars angle. With
this angle afixed in the protractor, you bring now leg 1 to stick
on natal Sun/Moon mid-point, and swing leg 2 to see where it cuts
the ecliptic on either side. If thus pivoting on leg 1 on the
natal Sun/Moon mid-point leg 2 comes to cut the ecliptic say 4 and
a half degrees off natal Cusp 7, then that's a canonic relation,
useful to derive an equation that will show you where the Cusp 7
should be, and thus you can obtain another rectified birth time as
per hypothesis number N of the family F. This particular canonic
relation states that the angle from wedding Venus to wedding Mars
is close to the angle from natal Sun/Moon mid-point to the natal
OBT Descendant. All what the corresponding equation does now, is
to assume that the relation is partile, and that thus the
approximately equal sign can be sustituted by the equal sign, so
that we have now that the Hypothetical Cusp 7 of our client, as per
this hypothesis #N of this family F, is equal to the natal Moon/Sun
angle plus wedding Venus minus wedding Mars. Of course, the plus
and minus signs will depend on whether Venus longitude is larger
than Mars, or on whether the natal Sun/Moon mid-point is this side
or that side of the natal OBT Descendant. So solving this simple
equation will yield the position of the hypothetical Descendant as
per this hypothesis, which in turn yields the Rectified Birth Time
as per Hypothesis #N of family F. So now I am ready to go find
another canonic relation which will yield another Hypothetical Cusp
ending in another Hypothetical Rectified birth time, which may or
may not converge within the moiety of the extant families, in which
case it creates a new family. Compiling a fairly large number of
hypothesis, each based on an equation derived from a canonic
relation, justifies the assumption that the orb was partile for
the relation upon which each rquation is based, because it is
obvious that the probability of the orb being applicative can be
considered a priori equal than the probability of the orb being
separative, which thus tends to cancel out as effectively as large
be the number of compiled hypothesis. This method allows one to
know, with full certainty, the precise instant of birth, provided
one is willing to process a sufficiently large number of
hypothesis. This can take a long time, and that is why the
pragmatics of the application of this method determines that the
practicant be alert to find short-cuts to minimize the number of
hypothesis. In my dayly practice, in an initial session with a new
client, if after 5 hours of work compiling hypothetical rectified
birth times with the client, the statistical sense of the extant
families does not allow for an easy resolution, I take the family
whose moiety captured the largest number of hypothesis and average
them all up. The individual components of the moiety of the
winning family may carry special ponderations, which should be
taken into consideration when averaging. One possible example is
when the equation is based on a relation that has as an element a
mid-point of 2 planets that were in relative proximity, or in
conjunction, and that both were relevant to the case, given the
nature of the event under consideration, so working with this
mid-point carries actually the weight of 2 different hypothesis,
since each of the planets could have generated its own equation
leading to its own hypothesis, and thus taking the mid-point
amounts to already averaging these 2 results of these 2 equations,
for which reason the weight of the hypothesis should be double at
the time of averaging all the hypothesis within the moiety of the
winning family. The moiety here refers to the interval of
convergence of all the hypothesis comprising a given family. The
width of this interval, like the cumulative average of all the
hypothetical birth times comprising that family, are clearly
essential to decide when one can safely assume that there is no
need to continue accruing hypothesis because one has already found
the True Rectified Birth Time. The practicants good statistical
sense comes into play at various moments in the procedure. Once
you have compiled many quantitative hypothesis of several families,
the overlapping of the moieties of these families of hypothesis
are often inviting to average them up as a single family, this is
a decision calling for sound statistics. Suppose for example that
you have a cluster of 14 hypothesis all converging in less than 3
minutes arc of the ecliptic, meaning about 12 minutes of clock
time, right ? This means, of course, that you have compiled 14
different hypothetical rectified birth times, each through an
equation grounded on a canonical relation spotted with the
protractor like I have shown above, and that these 14 hypothesis
converge in points spanning 3 degrees of arc for the averaged
rectified Ascendant resolving these 14 individual hypothesis of
the same family, implying that the moiety of this family of
hypothesis is of 12 minutes of clock time. But now imagine another
family of, say, 7 hypothesis converging in a moiety whose onset in
the ecliptic lies only less than 2 degrees away from the limit of
the moiety of the other family of 14 hypothesis ......should you
averge up the 21 hypothesis as a single family ? Should you
consider only the winning family and consider that the near by
moiety is another sensitive point, maybe linked to the first, like
for example the Descendant and the Vertex, they are always close
together and on the wedding day, for example, both serve as factors
of canonic relations with the relevant natal planets and the
wedding transits, and yet the Descendant is always a stronger zero
than the Vertex and allows to accrue more relations with the
protractor with the angles between the lords of the natal horizon
on the wedding day, or with wedding Venus/Mars angle or Moon/Sun
angle. So you have to go check that too, of course, before
proceding to just average up the 21 hypothesis of those 2 families
to ammalgamate them into a single family of wider moiety If you
then had a third family of 8 hypothetical rectified birth times
converging in a moiety to the other side of the initial family of
14 hypothesis than the second family of 7 hypothesis, and provided
this third family s moiety elso ends only a couple of degrees away
from the first family s moiety, then you would not hesitate to
average the 3 different moieties into one single family comprising
the 29 hypothesis of the 3 families. This would be sound,
statistically speaking, and the Ascendant you thus obtain carries
all the probability of being right on the mark, meaning that it is
the True Ascendant what you have found. The ultimate proof, is of
course, to start all over with different biographical dates from
the client's life and arrive again to the same figure through
totally different relations and equations and everything. Of
course, that takes a lot of time. The pragmatics of the
astrological consultation imposses other kind of limits as to the
degree of precision achieved in the rectification of the Ascendant
of a given client.. I have found that a minimum of 4 to 5 hours of
analysis is necessary for the astrologer to get some degree of
conviction as to the exact degree of the Ascendant, in an initial
session with a client . Practice certainly shows you shortcuts
to shorten the time required to acquire a firm conviction of having
already arrived to the True Ascendant. You learn that, for example
on wedding day, certain canonic relations have to resolve in the
Descendant/Ascendant axis, so you zero right away into finding
these. I have done this every day all my life, and I do the work
with the protractor in front of the client, while at the same time
I inerrogate him/her about the basic facts of his/her life: number
of siblings and their sexes, number of children and their sexes,
etc, because all this has to be acquainted by the Cusps we are
seeking to afix. The number of the siblings of the client, for
example, has to be spelled out by Cusp 3 of siblings. Every
sibling is a degree even though other scales may impose on that
one....So, moving the birth time 4 minutes of time implies having
one more brother. There is no way you can come to inject neptunian
confusion into the system by saying that radicality doesn't has
anything to do with the Axiom of Beginnings, when they are not
even the 2 sides of the same coin but actually the same side of the
same coin. I mean to say Francis, that you cannot take the bones
out of the skeleton.

When you rectify charts everyday with the stainless steel protractor, you
learn that the Cusps are real points that keep trapping your
protractor s tips as you scan arround in search of pattern linking
the angles of the relevant transiting planets both at the time of
the event used for rectifying and the natal chart. In some Houses
(like 7 and 8) the Apex of the House (mid-point of its arc)
carries as much significance as the Cusp of the House (initial
point of its arc). Other elements introduce noise at the time of
weighing the hypothesis, the interference of the other House
systems being the most important one, of course.. But basic
statistics allows us to rise about this easily. Just like the
position of an electron may be fuzzy and neptunian, because of
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the statistical nature of
quantum physics, that fuzzy electron is going to behave like a tiny
billiard ball when it collides at high speeds with another fuzzy
cloud of indeterminacy; so the Cusp and the Apex of a House appear
as solid entities revealing their position to the scanning
protractor because of their ability to function like a sub-fiducial
or origen for all matters pertaining the House in question.. The
connecting angles linking from the relevant transiting planets to
the relevant natal planets become sensical when the protractor
transposes them to that Cusps position

But then you come on and say that the fact that you do away with the Axiom
of Beginnings does not imply that the natal chart is radical, and
here you are only introducing heavy neptunian fuzz, probably even
tongue-in-cheek, as some listers have suggested to me in their
personal communications. Let me put it this way: if John was born
at 06:06 that means that the snap-shot of heavens is taken for that
moment in that place. You are freezing that chart which in itself,
without transits and progressions, for example through the
Alchochoden formula for determining life span , contains the exact
number of days that John is going to live in his body. If you move
that frozen instant 2 minutes, the story might be totally
different, because the Hyleg may now be another planet, and you
need the Hyleg to determine the Alchochoden, which is the natal
planet that will give you the number of days that John is going to
live according to the algorithm. If the Hyleg is different, the
alchochoden will be different too, and thus his life span, measured
in days, will be different as well.

>Just to be clear, no original manuscripts of the "Tetrabiblos" are
>known to exist. The Greek editions we now have were translated
>from the Arabic in the fourteenth century.

Yes, you are correct on that....I apologize for my
misunderstanding. My new Spanish edition of Ptolemy reads on the
cover "Brand new translation from most accurate sources", but now
that I've read the preface by the translator I see that you are
right about the primary sources being actually secondary. However,
you also said that Ptolemy was not a compilator of earlier
tradition, and that does not coincide with what this translator
says. The translator is Demetrio Santos a well known astrologer
and mathematician, and he says the following (my translation into
English from the Spanish):

STARTS QUOTE:
" We cannot consider that Ptolemy was an original thinker himself,
and nowhere in his work does he pretend to be one, either: he
always tries to quote his sources, when they are known to him, or
else he tells us that his sources are old but unknown to him.
Particularly as it concerns astrology, he succeeded in his attempts
to compile the knowledge of his predecessors and of his
contemporaries, confering this knowledge a coherent form while
making it understandable, some times too understandable as a matter
of fact, since he himself was often uncapable of truly fathoming
the foundations of what he was talking about, and facing this
difficulty, he rationalized factual data in an attempt to account
for them. In his interpretations of Hypparcus data, for example,
we can quickly realize that he was wrong where Hypparcus right. It
is easy to see that the same happened also in his astrological
reasonings. In the context of his mediocre students, anyhow he was
not more than a fair professor. He wasn`t a genius, only a man
with common sense aware of his strategic position in the center of
the intelectual activity of his times, who had the good sense of
making it his aim to gather a compendium of what was known up to
his time". END OF QUOTE

This same man, who translated this edition of Ptolomey into
Spanish, Demetrio Santos, has some good books of his own who have
never been translated into English: I particularly enjoyed his
"Theoretical Astrology" where he deduces the astrological system,
including the nature of the signs, the planets, the aspects, the
Houses, the dignities and so forth, strictly from some key
differential equations derived from wave mechanics. In another
book of his, also not in English, called "Physical Astr9ology", he
builds a monumental physical model of the astrological effect as
mediated by physics fundamental forces (electromagnetism, gravity,
nuclear strong and nuclear week). Even though I donot subscribe
to the theory that the astrological correspondence is mainly a
physical effect, Demetrio Santos s reductionistic approach is very
sound and commendable, under the politics that only taking that
road with our heart and mind will allow us to define whether it is
true or not that the limits are finite. Of course, I am talking
about the limits of the reductionistic approach. They may very
well actually tend to infinity. Beyond certain limits, any
structure requires skeleton and astrology is not a jelly fish,
even though it may have some jelly fish like structures floating
around. The reductionistic approach is Saturn's astrology,
astrology with a backbone Showing pictures of jelly-fish is no
argument against the reductionistic way. The fact that a jelly
fish lives and swims is no argument against the existence of
verrebrate organisms. Elsewhere I have made the point that
astrology is like Physics before Newton. Astrology is waiting for
a mathematical genius to come do for the Tetrabiblos what Newton
did for the Almagest. Mathematics studies relations between sets.
Astrology studies the relations existing between the state of the
heavenly variables on the one set, and the characteristics of the
events that manifest in the world, on the other. We need the
equivalent of an algebra and a calculus, that allow us to follow a
reasoning to derive its implications, through operational
transformations according to combinatorial logics, and thus be able
to arrive at predictions about the qualities and the quantities
pertaining the characteristics of future events. We need to
mathematize astrology, like Newton mathematized physics by
discovering the derivative and the integral that allowed to handle
motion with differential equations. Mathematics made possible to
trust propositions like "within 10 years from now the position of
Saturn will be such and such longituude" and that meant that
physics had gone beyond the Almagestus. Same way, we are awaiting
for the discovery of the proper mathematical tool that will allow
us to go beyond the tetrabiblos, to mathematize fully our
interpretation of the chart to derive knowledge of the
characteristics of the native's future in terms of specific actual
events and his experience of them.

About the birth of Alexander the Great, and Tyl's story of how Necanebus
carried on the astrological planning of his conception and
birthtime to optimize the necessary characteristics necessary to
enable him to conquest the whole worlld with the sword, I think
that there is no way you can defend your thesis that this might not
have been what we call now astrology. It's like if you argued
that the bridges built by these peoples were not really civil
engineer. Some of those old bridges may be still extant now days,
and you may call them what you wish, but they are what they are:
solid bridges serving their purpose according to design.

In his introduction to the Spanish translation of Ptolemy, Demetrio Santos
explains how before accomplishing this translation he read all the
extant works on astrology by al of Ptolemy's contemporaries (and he
cites Higinio, Vitruvio, Mannilius, Hermes and Macroobio ) as well
as the other works by the arabic translators (citing Haly Geber,
Messahallah, Zahel, Albubather, Ben Ezra, etc.) He is clearly
trying to put the puzzle together the best he could.

>> But check now the work of
>> Vettius Valens, contemporary
>> of Ptolomy . . . the Axiom of
>> Beginnings is simply taken for
>> granted.
>
>I have been on the waiting list for the existing translations of
>Vettius Valens at one of the university libraries nearby, once it
>become available you can be sure that I will be reading it closely
>for "Seeds and Beginnings". Are there any portions in particular
>that you feel unambiguously support the concept?

I have recently acquired all of the extant translations of Valen in
English (4 books so far, another 4 coming soon), from Project
Hindsight, and am planning to alot time to an in depth study of
this other author contemporary of Ptolemy. Since anyway this reply
has gotten to be too long, I will leave continuing with this
discussion for another posting sometime soon, but I will close this
posting now with a quote from Robert Schmidt, Director of Project
Hindsight and translator of Vettius Valens into English (he has
also translated Ptolemy into English). This quote is taken from
one of his lessons in Phasewatch mailing list and it addresses the
question of to what extent the greeks took the Axiom of Beginnings
for granted:

QUOTE:
Let me also mention that the degrees of the zodiac are called
moirai, or fates. The allotment for an individual man is
presumably the various degrees or fates he is allotted at birth (as
marked out by the planets).
But Heimarmeneh does not simply mean man's allotment at birth; it
also refers to his destiny or his fate. And according to
Hellenistic Astrology all the "events" in a man's life are
apotelesma, things brought to a conclusion from some katarcheh or
inception. I have argued that these words belong to the context of
ritual, and that "the history of the nativity" should be understood
in terms of ritualistic connection. END OF QUOTE

So, you see, the concept of Inception, implying the Axiom of
Beginnings, was a central concept of Hellenistic astrology: the
allotment of fate occurred at katarcheh, a seed moment, a
commencement,,,,,,. like it has always been in all traditions.
That's why I have given this principle the rank of Axiom, Like
Axiom Number 3 or the Fiducial Axiom, as I call it, stating that
there is a point that serves as beginning, that has fiducial. I
call Axiom number 4 the Dodeka Axiom, which states that the
submodulation in 12ths of the ecliptic is superior to all other
submodulations of the ecliptic modulus both for zoodiacal or
mundane purposes.

I will continue replying to your comments and objections in future
postings as time allows it......

Thank you very much for your kind attention

Most Attentively

Dr. Gonzalo Pena Tamez

Astrologers

P.D.: My very long article on _The Prediction of Death and the
Alchochoden_ can now be accessed in full in the web by pointing
your browser to the Zodiacal Zephyre.